Water Well System Installations - Estimating Costs
Water well systems are installed over three distinct phases of work:
The hardest part to estimate is the cost of drilling, since the actual location of the aquifer under your land is often an unknown.
As part of your planning, always call, or request a bid online. Certain areas have very specific drilling considerations that are not always documented in the public domain and may affect the final outcome of your project.
Water Witching or Dowsing
Additionally, we can provide water witching services free of charge. We don't put much stock in it - see whyhere - but the sticks move, and in locations where water is tough, it may be worth hedging your bets.
Aquifer Location Services
Unlike water witching, seismic analysis of underground formations is a scientifically verifiable process. The type of seismic analysis used for finding water aquifers was originally developed and is used quite frequently in oil and natural gas drilling. Unfortunately, the scale of oil and gas drilling operations is much much larger than water well drilling operations. Typically, oil and gas companies spend millions of dollars researching an area before a well is ever even thought of as feasible. Using this same science in the water industry at a much smaller scale leaves much to be desired in the actual gathering of data and the amount of usable data. According to the professionals that practice this work, it's really only a valid excise if your pursuing flow rates greater than 2-1/2 GPM.
Costs
The average well is between 40 and 200 feet deep in Western Washington. There are quite a few areas where wells range from 40 to over 1,000 feet deep, and there are some areas where all the wells are 300 or more feet deep. Local geologic history and present day geology make huge differences in what is expected from any particular well. On average, wells start at about $3,500 to drill, but can end up much higher. For a more accurate estimate, call us!
Complicated drilling conditions and/or large yield wells require different approaches to drilling than a typical residential well. If the well is to be drilled to 50 feet to draw 25 gallons per minute from a good aquifer, it's quite easy to accomplish this. Getting to 1000 feet to pull 50 gallons per minute is much more difficult and requires a great deal more effort in the drilling & pumping design/construction processes. It's very important to know the end goals of your well, both current and future.
In order to accurately estimate the costs, we recommend that you determine the desired end use for the well, then contact us.
Well pumps, water treatment, and storage systems are generally all sized and estimated following discovery & testing of an aquifer. If you're curious about pump design & running costs, we've written a guide on pump efficiency.
These additional resources may be of some use:
- Water Well Drilling - A Home Owner's Guide (Washington State)
- Water Well Drilling Fees (Washington State, does not include any city/county fees):Adobe PDF File
